Nobody knows exactly who wrote them, but they had a very wide circulation among the Jews at the time of our Lord’s ministry. As explained above, the Hebrew canon of Holy Scripture had not at that time been definitely fixed, and there was much difference of opinion in the rabbinical schools as to whether any or all of these books should be included in the Sacred Writings. When the Council of Jamnia (A.D. 90) settled the question of the contents of the Hebrew Bible, these fourteen books were all excluded. Meantime, however, the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament writings) was being produced by the liberal-minded Jews of Alexandria, and the Septuagint included the Apocryphal books.
In the first Christian centuries, various collections of the Sacred Writings were in use, some containing certain of the Apocryphal books and some containing others. Straight down to the Reformation the Apocrypha was included in the official Christian Bible through all of Christendom.
The reformers of the sixteenth century pursued a different course. Finding their exclusive authority in the Holy Scriptures, they carefully examined the question as to the relative standing of these two sets of writings. They recognized a distinction but refused to abolish the Apocrypha which had been an integral part of the Christian Bible for so many centuries. In the first complete edition of Luther’s Bible (A.D. 1534), the Apocrypha was included as a supplement to the Old Testament with the notation that they were books “which are not held equal to the sacred Scriptures, and nevertheless are useful and good to read.” Neither were they discarded in the English Bible but were retained as a separate section between the Testaments, and in the Sixth Article of Religion it was specified that the Church reads them “for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.”
Protestant sentiment, however, has run more and more to a disparagement of the Apocrypha. About a hundred years ago (in 1827), the British and Foreign Bible Society, over vigorous protest, decided to omit it entirely from their printings of the Bible. Since that time, most English copies of the Authorized or Revised Versions have circulated without the Apocrypha until many readers of the Bible today scarcely know that the books exist. This seems very unfortunate. For fifteen hundred years the Christian world cherished the Apocrypha in its Bibles. It is a fair question to ask what right any person or group of persons has to drop out fourteen books from the Bible which the Christian world used for fifteen centuries and which most of the Christian world still uses today?
THE NEW TESTAMENT
It is important to remember that our Lord wrote nothing. It is also important to remember that for many years after the Church was launched on its career there were no Christian writings at all such as we have now in the New Testament. There was no need for them at the beginning. Our Lord was called “Rabbi” and plainly followed rabbinical methods in instructing His Apostles. These consisted in reiterating to a small, intimate group brief summaries of His teachings which were carefully learned word for word. To these memorized “Sayings” were added eye-witness accounts of things which the Apostles had seen Him do. All this formed the substance of apostolic teaching—“all that Jesus began both to do and teach.”7 From place to place the Apostles traveled, repeating their story and teaching others as they themselves had learned.
These oral accounts of the Messiah circulated through Jewish communities all over the ancient world. Year after year pilgrims from everywhere came up to the Holy City for the annual feasts and sought further instruction. In Jerusalem the Apostles met these inquirers in groups—much as the boy Jesus sat “in the midst of the doctors”—and taught them to memorize the Sayings of Christ, His parables and oral accounts of His deeds. Such official teaching was carried away to all quarters and comprised the Christian Tradition referred to by St. Paul—“hold the traditions which ye have been taught.”8
Then conditions began to change. The number of inquirers became so numerous that it was increasingly difficult to care for them by the group method. These brief, concise instructions began to be written down so they could be carried home by the pilgrims. Also the growing Church brought more and more non-Jews into the fold who knew only Greek and who were unaccustomed to the rabbinical teaching by word of mouth. The Gentiles wanted it in written form. So the Sayings of our Lord, or the “Logia,” came into existence.
Then something else happened. St. Paul introduced a new style of letter-writing. In his missionary activity he went from city to city preaching and teaching the “tradition” and organizing congregations of Christians. But he was always under pressure to seek out new fields, and there were enemies on his track only too eager to tear down what he had erected as soon as he moved on to another place. St. Paul soon felt the necessity of following up his work by correspondence. He conceived the idea of writing letters (“epistles”) addressed, not to an individual person, but to a congregation for public reading. A few personal letters that he wrote have been preserved, but most of them were sent to entire congregations, often with instructions to send copies to neighboring congregations. These letters were not intended to introduce Christ to people who had no knowledge of Him. They were written to reinforce the teaching the Apostle had already given, to answer questions and to deal with local problems of spiritual discipline and Christian behavior. St. Paul’s epistles always presupposed a knowledge of the Gospel on the part of his readers. Any attempt to understand them is hopeless unless this fact is kept quite clear.
It was about the year A.D. 50 that St. Paul sent his first letter to the Thessalonians, which is the earliest Christian writing to come down to us. Other epistles followed. It is significant to note that all of these epistles had been composed before the first of the four Gospels was committed to writing. When some critics insist that the simple Jesus of the Gospels was subsequently distorted by St. Paul’s subtle theology, it is well to remember that his epistles were all in circulation before any of the Gospels appeared. And it is not likely that the Church would have put its seal on Gospel records which were in conflict with the prevailing teaching about Christ—eventually gathering both into the canon of Holy Scripture.
From the very beginning, the Apostles were the accredited teachers. They had been His chosen companions, they had seen Him in action, and they had been trained by Him personally to fill the role of leaders. Those books which were written by Apostles, or by those who were close enough to the Apostles to give an accurate statement of apostolic teaching, were accredited by common consent and incorporated in the New Testament canon.
This is the Bible which continues year after year to be the best seller in the book market. It has been carried all over the world. It has been translated into a thousand languages and dialects. It has brought comfort, consolation, and enlightenment to countless numbers of people for the past nineteen centuries. No book has ever been under such persistent, critical scrutiny as this Book. It has been studied by the best minds of the ages—sometimes sympathetically, and often in a spirit of hostility. But through it all the Bible has come with flying colors, all the better authenticated because of the searching study to which it has been subjected. No intelligent person can afford to be ignorant of it. No Christian person can escape a sense of reverence for it.
1 St. Matthew 5: 43–44.
2 Exodus 21:24.
3 St. Luks 11:19.
4 Numbers 21:14–20; Joshua 10:12–13.
5 Exodus 15.
6 Judges 5.
7 Acts 1:1.
8 I Thessalonians 2:15.
V
THE HOLY TRINITY
Somewhere G. K. Chesterton has written—“It is the saint who tries to get his head into the heavens; it is the atheist who tries to get the heavens into his head; and it is his head that splits.”
As has already been said in a previous chapter, we cannot explain God because our heads are too little and our brains too feeble to accommodate Him. Nevertheless,